Manage Secrets for Confluent Platform with Kubernetes and HashiCorp Vault

This post details the integration of Confluent Platform deployed via Confluent Operator on Kubernetes with HashiCorp Vault for secure secret management. It outlines the background challenges of manual credential management and presents a demo using a GitHub source connector. Key technical contributions include: setting up Vault in developer mode on Kubernetes, configuring Kubernetes authentication for Vault, enabling KV-v2 secrets, storing a GitHub access token, creating a Vault policy (gh-read) to grant read access to the token, and binding this policy to a Kubernetes Service Account ('connect') in the 'confluent' namespace. This enables the connector to securely access credentials from Vault without exposing them in configuration files or logs.